I was thinking of how to write reviews on Goodreads for three books I had just read – something you are not obliged to do but it is a good exercise. I then realised that they had something in common. Deciding to review them as a group was the next step and here we are! Without going into detail about the plots or writing styles, the effect of displacement is one of the themes that runs through all three. Of losing families, homes, governments, societies.
‘A Pale view of Hills’, Kazuo Ishiguro; ‘Beasts of No Nation’, Uzodinama Iweala; and ‘A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian’, Marina Lewycka, have been read and reviewed and were hot news quite a while ago. They are all written in English by, respectively, Japanese, Nigerian and Ukrainian authors.
‘A Pale View of Hills‘ is set mainly in the eerie memories of a Japanese woman who survived the horrific bombings in Japan at the end of the Second World War. The book drifts between the present – where she is living in England – and her haunted past. There is a twist to the tale which adds another unsettling layer. What cannot be ignored in the book is the shattered worlds of the people left behind after that catastrophic event. The cold, mindless, harsh destruction of entire families, the fabric of their society. Where did it leave the minds of these remaining people? What did they think and feel?
‘Beast of No Nation’ is a depiction of the life of a child soldier in a fictitious country in Africa. In Africa the devastation is a slowed down version of the swift blow dealt Japan. The desperate brutality and futile battles drag on and on. This book is a window on that world. Told in first person, you experience the boy’s sense of drifting through hell, with no beginning and no end. You feel his helpless breaking away from the simple existence he had before. He’d been forced into this war, one of the many, that had nothing to do with him. War is a churner, spewing out lives and crushing societies.
‘A Short History of Tractors in the Ukraine’ This book, set in England, touches on the lives of a handful of people, some who have left and some who are still trying to leave, a part of the world that is in a constant state of flux, Ukraine. Here the typical ‘Russian Bride’ story plays out. Now you may look down your nose at a woman like this and her modus operandi but she is one of many thousands of women (Ukraine and elsewhere) whose only hope of having some kind of a life other than the scrappy one that awaits them, is to do something this crazy. It is crazy and desperate. Some of these brides flip once they have the passport – dump the husband. Others are trapped by their ‘agents’ in a never-ending spiral of debt. In this book, the Ukrainian bride’s prospects are actually better than some. At least she had something to go back to.
The topic of war, natural disaster and subsequent displacement raises endless questions about what we should be doing. Throughout history people have been having their lives dismantled, cast into the unknown with only their own society’s norms, (or fragments thereof) as survival kits. Some are too young to even have been assimilated into their own culture, let alone another.
When I bring displacement into the context of my own South African life – the main destination for African migrants and refugees in Africa – the same applies here as in any country. The refugee or migrant population are perceived to be the ones who do the illegal stuff and menial jobs. There are those more fortunate, who bring money into the country and start a small business in the area they live in. What happens in many cases to these hard-working migrants, is that they get targeted by locals and have their place burnt down. Xenophobia, in post-Apartheid South Africa. They are a threat to the people battling along in the same channels. It a very sad state of affairs. As for the menial work – everyone knows it is better to hire a Malawian or Zimbabwean to do a paint job or some gardening. They are harder workers and honest. They are also desperate.
Look into your own life – if you are reading this you have access to a computer, the internet, and some idle time to read a random blog post. Around you and in your life are people who are displaced from their societies, by age, disablement, broken relationships, by voluntary immigration. It is an amazing thing how we somehow continuously try to adapt and tell the story of mankind.
Information:
‘A Pale view of Hills’, Kazuo Ishiguro – Orange Shortlist 2011 – Sir Kazuo Ishiguro OBE FRSA FRSL
‘Beasts of No Nation’, Uzodinama Iweala – Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters, the New York Public Library Young Lions 2006 Fiction Award, and the 2006 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian’, Marina Lewycka – Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; Waverton Good Read Award, 2005/6, short-listed for Orange Prize for fiction, 2005.
Inktober was over and my pens, ink and paper were still lying around. I was doodling away one day when I came up with the idea of doing a postcard for my friend Alison. Alison has many hobbies and skills – writing, blogging, Mahjong-playing and dessert-making, to name a few … Post-crossing is another and at some point she had given me the heads up on the ‘sleeping’, well, comatose market in South African-themed or simply, South African-made postcards. We just don’t seem to do this much – unless you go in for hippos/ wildlife or traditional African themes from the sixties. Perhaps it has something to do with email or our sometimes dodgy post service. I kind of feel that wherever you are in the world, a post/greetings card, once sent, is truly something that you hope will arrive at its destination. Something that enters a postal service anywhere is a pretty vulnerable item – unless you courier it. So postcards or greetings cards in themselves represent a whim, an element of chance and are really such fun when you get one. And sometimes when you receive a particularly scuffed one, you really wonder where it’s been.
TRAVELLING LIGHT 